Two Years Ago, Volume I

"Oh, go! go!" said Mary. "You will let him go, Doctor Thurnall, and see the poor girl free? Think how dreadful it must be to be a slave."

"I will, my little Miss Mary; and for more reasons than you think of.

Little do you know how dreadful it is to be a slave."

"Hum!" said Mark Armsworth. "That's a queer story. Tom, have you got the poor fellow's money? Didn't lose it when you were taken by those Tartars?"

"Not I. I wasn't so green as to carry it with me. It ought to have been in England six months ago. My only fear is, it's not enough."

"Hum!" said Mark. "How much more do you think you'll want?"

"Heaven knows. There is a thousand dollars; but if she be half as beautiful as poor Wyse used to swear she was, I may want more than double that."

"If you do, pay it, and I'll pay you again. No, by George!" said Mark, "no one shall say that while Mark Armsworth had a balance at his bankers' he let a poor girl—" and, recollecting Mary's presence, he finished his sentence by sundry stamps and thumps on the table.

"You would soon exhaust your balance, if you set to work to free all poor girls who are in the same case in Georgia," said the Doctor.

"Well, what of that? Them I don't know of, and so I ain't responsible for them; but this one I do know of, and so—there, I can't argue; but, Tom, if you want the money, you know where to find it."

"Very good. By the by—I forgot it till this moment—who should come down in the coach with me but the lost John Briggs."

"He is come too late, then," said the Doctor. "His poor father died this morning."

"Ah! then Briggs knew that he was ill? That explains the Manfredic mystery and gloom with which he greeted me."

"I cannot tell. He has written from time to time, but he has never given any address; so that no one could write in return."

"He may have known. He looked very downcast. Perhaps that explains his cutting me dead."

"Cut you?" cried Mark. "I dare say he's been doing something he's ashamed of, and don't want to be recognised. That fellow has been after no good all this while, I'll warrant. I always say he's connected with the swell mob, or croupier at a gambling-table, or something of that kind. Don't you think it's likely, now?"

Mark was in the habit of so saying for the purpose of tormenting the Doctor, who held stoutly to his old belief, that John Briggs was a very clever man, and would turn up some day as a distinguished literary character.

"Well," said Tom, "honest or not, he's thriving; came down inside the coach, dressed in the distinguished foreigner style, with lavender kid gloves, and French boots."

"Just like a swell pickpocket," said Mark. "I always told you so, Thurnall."

"He had the old Byron collar, and Raphael hair, though."

"Nasty, effeminate, un-English foppery," grumbled Mark; "so he may be in the scribbling line after all."

"I'll go and see if I can find him," quoth the Doctor.

"Bother you," said Mark, "always running out o' nights after somebody else's business, instead of having a jolly evening. You stay, Tom, like a sensible fellow, and tell me and Mary some more travellers' lies. Had much sporting, boy?"

"Hum! I've shot and hunted every beast, I think, shootable and huntable, from a humming-bird to an elephant; and I had some splendid fishing in Canada; but, after all, give me a Whitbury trout, on a single-handed Chevalier. We'll at them to-morrow, Mr. Armsworth."

"We will, my boy! never so many fish in the river as this year, or in season so early."

The good Doctor returned; but with no news which could throw light on the history of the now mysterious Mr. John Briggs. He had locked himself into the room with his father's corpse, evidently in great excitement and grief; spent several hours in walking up and down there alone; and had then gone to an attorney in the town, and settled everything about the funeral "in the handsomest way," said the man of law; "and was quite the gentleman in his manner, but not much of a man of business; never had even thought of looking for his father's will; and was quite surprised when I told him that there ought to be a fair sum—eight hundred or a thousand, perhaps, to come in to him, if the stock and business were properly disposed of. So he went off to London by the evening mail, and told me to address him to the post-office in some street off the Strand. Queer business, sir, isn't it?"

John Briggs did not reappear till a few minutes before his father's funeral, witnessed the ceremony evidently with great sorrow, bowed off silently all who attempted to speak to him, and returned to London by the next coach—leaving matter for much babble among all Whitbury gossips. One thing at least was plain, that he wished to be forgotten in his native town; and forgotten he was, in due course of time.

Tom Thurnall stayed his month at home, and then went to America; whence he wrote home, in about six months, a letter, of which only one paragraph need interest us,

"Tell Mark I have no need for his dollars. I have done the deed; and, thanks to the underground railway, done it nearly gratis; which was both cheaper than buying her, and infinitely better for me; so that she has all poor Wyse's dollars to start with afresh in Canada. I write this from New York. I could accompany her no farther; for I must get back to the South in time for the Mexican expedition."

Then came a long and anxious silence; and then a letter, not from Mexico but from California,—one out of several which had been posted; and then letters, more regularly from Australia. Sickened with Californian life, he had crossed the Pacific once more, and was hard at work in the diggings, doctoring and gold-finding by turns.

"A rolling stone gathers no moss," said his father.

"He has the pluck of a hound, and the cunning of a fox," said Mark; "and he'll be a credit to you yet."

And Mary prayed every morning and night for her old playfellow; and so the years slipped on till the autumn of 1853.

As no one has heard of Tom now for eight months and more (the pulse of Australian postage being of a somewhat intermittent type), we may as well go and look for him.

A sheet of dark rolling ground, quarried into a gigantic rabbit burrow, with hundreds of tents and huts dotted about among the heaps of rubbish; dark evergreen forests in the distance, and, above all, the great volcanic mountain of Buninyong towering far aloft—these are the "Black Hills of Ballarat;" and that windlass at that shaft's mouth belongs in part to Thomas Thurnall.

At the windlass are standing two men, whom we may have seen in past years, self-satisfied in countenance, and spotless in array, sauntering down Piccadilly any July afternoon, or lounging in Haggis's stable-yard at Cambridge any autumn morning. Alas! how changed from the fast young undergraduates, with powers of enjoyment only equalled by their powers of running into debt, are those two black-bearded and mud-bespattered ruffians, who once were Smith and Brown of Trinity. Yet who need pity them, as long as they have stouter limbs, healthier stomachs, and clearer consciences, than they have had since they left Eton at seventeen? Would Smith have been a happier man as a briefless barrister in a dingy Inn of Law, peeping now and then into third-rate London society, and scribbling for the daily press! Would Brown have been a happier man had he been forced into those holy orders for which he never felt the least vocation, to pay off his college debts out of his curate's income, and settle down on his lees, at last, in the family living of Nomansland-cum-Clayhole, and support a wife and five children on five hundred a-year, exclusive of rates and taxes? Let them dig, and be men.

The windlass rattles and the rope goes down. A shout from the bottom of the shaft proclaims all right; and in due time, sitting in the noose of the rope, up comes Thomas Thurnall, bare-footed and bare-headed, in flannel trousers and red jersey, begrimed with slush and mud; with a mahogany face, a brick-red neck, and a huge brown beard, looking, to use his own expression, "as jolly as a sandboy."

"A letter for you, Doctor, from Europe."

Tom takes it, and his countenance falls; for it is black-edged and black-sealed. The handwriting is Mary Armsworth's.

"I suppose the old lady who is going to leave me a fortune is dead," says he drily, and turns away to read.

"Bad luck, I suppose," he says to himself, "I have not had any for full six months, so I suppose it is time for Dame Fortune to give me a sly stab again. I only hope it is not my father; for, begging the Dame's pardon, I can bear any trick of hers but that." And he sets his teeth doggedly, and reads.

"My dear Mr. Thurnall,—My father would have written himself, but he thought, I don't know why, that I could tell you better than he. Your father is quite well in health,"—Thurnall breathes freely again—"but he has had heavy trials since your poor brother William's death."

Tom opens his eyes and sets his teeth more firmly. "Willy dead? I suppose there is a letter lost: better so; better to have the whole list of troubles together, and so get them sooner over. Poor Will!"

"Your father caught the scarlet fever from him, while he was attending him, and was very ill after he came back. He is quite well again now; but if I must tell you the truth, the disease has affected his eyes. You know how weak they always were, and how much worse they have grown of late years; and the doctors are afraid that he has little chance of recovering the sight, at least of the left eye."

"Recovering? He's blind, then." And Tom set his teeth more tightly than ever. He felt a sob rise in his throat, but choked it down, shaking his head like an impatient bull.

"Wait a bit, Tom," said he to himself, "before you have it out with Dame Fortune. There's more behind, I'll warrant. News like this lies in pockets, and not in single nuggets." And he read on—

"And—for it is better you should know all—something has happened to the railroad in which he had invested so much. My father has lost money in it also; but not much: but I fear that your poor dear father is very much straitened. My father is dreadfully vexed about it, and thinks it all his fault in not having watched the matter more closely, and made your father sell out in time: and he wants your father to come and live with us: but he will not hear of it. So he has given up the old house, and taken one in Water Street, and, oh! I need not tell you that we are there every day, and that I am trying to make him as happy as I can—but what can I do? And then followed kind womanly commonplaces, which Tom hurried over with fierce impatience.

"He wants you to come home; but my father has entreated him to let you stay. You know, while we are here, he is safe; and my father begs you not to come home, if you are succeeding as well as you have been doing."

There was much more in the letter, which I need not repeat; and, after all, a short postscript, by Mark himself, followed:—

"Stay where you are, boy, and keep up heart; while I have a pound, your father shall have half of it; and you know Mark Armsworth."

He walked away slowly into the forest. He felt that the crisis of his life was come; that he must turn his hand henceforth to quite new work; and as he went he "took stock," as it were, of his own soul, to see what point he had attained—what he could do.

Fifteen years of adventure had hardened into wrought metal a character never very ductile. Tom was now, in his own way, an altogether accomplished man of the world, who knew (at least in all companies and places where he was likely to find himself) exactly what to say, to do, to make, to seek, and to avoid. Shifty and thrifty as old Greek, or modern Scot, there were few things he could not invent, and perhaps nothing he could not endure. He had watched human nature under every disguise, from the pomp of the ambassador to the war-paint of the savage, and formed his own clear, hard, shallow, practical estimate thereof. He looked on it as his raw material, which he had to work up into subsistence and comfort for himself. He did not wish to live on men, but live by them he must; and for that purpose he must study them, and especially their weaknesses. He would not cheat them; for there was in him an innate vein of honesty, so surly and explosive, at times, as to give him much trouble. The severest part of his self-education had been the repression of his dangerous inclination to call a sham a sham on the spot, and to answer fools according to their folly. That youthful rashness, however, was now well-nigh subdued, and Tom could flatter and bully also, when it served his turn—as who cannot? Let him that is without sin among my readers, cast the first stone. Self-conscious he was, therefore, in every word and action; not from morbid vanity, but a necessary consequence of his mode of life. He had to use men, and therefore to watch how he used them; to watch every word, gesture, tone of voice, and, in all times and places, do the fitting thing. It was hard work: but necessary for a man who stood alone and self-poised in the midst of the universe; fashioning for himself everywhere, just as far as his arm could reach, some not intolerable condition; depending on nothing but himself, and caring for little but himself and the father whom, to do him justice, he never forgot. If I wished to define Tom Thurnall by one epithet, I should call him specially an ungodly man—were it not that scriptural epithets have, now-a-days, such altogether conventional and official meanings, that one fears to convey, in using them, some notion quite foreign to the truth. Tom was certainly not one of those ungodly whom David had to deal with of old, who robbed the widow, and put the fatherless to death. His morality was as high as that of the average; his sense of honour far higher. He was generous and kind-hearted. No one ever heard him tell a lie; and he had a blunt honesty about him, half real, because he liked to be honest, and yet half affected too, because he found it pay in the long run, and because it threw off their guard the people whom he intended to make his tools. But of godliness in its true sense—of belief that any Being above cared for him, and was helping him in the daily business of life—that it was worth while asking that Being's advice, or that any advice would be given if asked for; of any practical notion of a Heavenly Father, or a Divine education—Tom was as ignorant as thousands of respectable people who go to church every Sunday, and read good books, and believe firmly that the Pope is Antichrist. He ought to have learnt it, no doubt; for his father was a religious man: but he had not learnt it—any more than thousands learn it, who have likewise religious parents. He had been taught, of course, the common doctrines and duties of religion; but early remembrances had been rubbed out, as off a schoolboy's slate, by the mere current of new thoughts and objects, in his continual wanderings. Disappointments he had had, and dangers in plenty; but only such as rouse a brave and cheerful spirit to bolder self-reliance and invention; not those deep sorrows of the heart which leave a man helpless in the lowest pit, crying for help from without, for there is none within. He had seen men of all creeds, and had found in all alike (so he held) the many rogues, and the few honest men. All religions were, in his eyes, equally true and equally false. Superior morality was owing principally to the influences of race and climate; and devotional experiences (to judge, at least, from American camp-meetings and popish-cities) the results of a diseased nervous system.

Upon a man so hard and strong this fearful blow had fallen, and, to do him justice, he took it like a man. He wandered on and on for an hour or more, up the hills, and into the forest, talking to himself.

"Poor old Willy! I should have liked to have looked into his honest face before he went, if only to make sure that we were good friends. I used to plague him sadly with my tricks. But what is the use of wishing for what cannot be? I recollect I had just the same feeling when John died; and yet I got over it after a time, and was as cheerful as if he were alive again, or had never lived at all. And so I shall get over this. Why should I give way to what I know will pass, and is meant to pass? It is my father I feel for. But I couldn't be there; and it is no fault of mine that I was not there. No one told me what was going to happen; and no one could know: so again,—why grieve over what can't be helped?"

And then, to give the lie to all his cool arguments, he sat down among the fern, and burst into a violent fit of crying. "Oh, my poor dear old daddy!"

Yes; beneath all the hard crust of years, that fountain of life still lay pure as when it came down from heaven—love for his father.

"Come, come, this won't do; this is not the way to take stock of my goods, either mental or worldly. I can't cry the dear old man out of this scrape."

He looked up. The sun was setting. Beneath the dark roof of evergreens the eucalyptus boles stood out, like basalt pillars, black against a background of burning flame. The flying foxes shot from tree to tree, and moths as big as sparrows whirred about the trunks, one moment black against the glare beyond, and vanishing the next, like imps of darkness, into their native gloom. There was no sound of living thing around, save the ghastly rattle of the dead bark-tassels which swung from every tree, and far away, the faint clicking of the diggers at their work, like the rustle of a gigantic ant-hill. Was there one among them all who cared for him? who would not forget him in a week with—"Well, he was pleasant company, poor fellow," and go on digging without a sigh? What, if it were his fate to die, as he had seen many a stronger man, there in that lonely wilderness, and sleep for ever, unhonoured and unknown, beneath that awful forest roof, while his father looked for bread to others' hands?

No man was less sentimental, no man less superstitious than Thomas Thurnall; but crushed and softened—all but terrified (as who would not have been?)—by that day's news, he could not struggle against the weight of loneliness which fell upon him. For the first and last time, perhaps, in his life, he felt fear; a vague, awful dread of unseen and inevitable possibilities. Why should not calamity fall on him, wave after wave? Was it not falling on him already? Why should he not grow sick to-morrow, break his leg, his neck—why not? What guarantee had he in earth or heaven that he might not be "snuffed out silently," as he had seen hundreds already, and die and leave no sign? And there sprang up in him at once the intensest yearning after his father and the haunts of his boyhood, and the wildest dread that he should never see them. Might not his father be dead ere he could return?—if ever he did return. That twelve thousand miles of sea looked to him a gulf impassable. Oh, that he were safe at home! that he could start that moment! And for one minute a helplessness, as of a lost child, came over him.

Perhaps it had been well for him had he given that feeling vent, and, confessing himself a lost child, cried out of the darkness to a Father; but the next minute he had dashed it proudly away.

"Pretty baby I am, to get frightened, at my time of life, because I find myself in a dark wood—and the sun shining all the while as jollily as ever away there in the west! It is morning somewhere or other now, and it will be morning here again to-morrow. 'Good times and bad times, and all times pass over;'—I learnt that lesson out of old Bewick's vignettes, and it has stood me in good stead this many a year, and shall now. Die? Nonsense. I take more killing than that comes to. So for one more bout with old Dame Fortune. If she throws me again, why, I'll get up again, as I have any time these fifteen years. Mark's right. I'll stay here and work till I make a hit, or luck runs dry, and then home and settle; and, meanwhile, I'll go down to Melbourne to-morrow, and send the dear old man two hundred pounds; and then back again here, and to it again."

And with a fate-defiant smile, half bitter and half cheerful, Tom rose and went down again to his mates, and stopped their inquiries by—"What's done can't be mended, and needn't be mentioned; whining won't make me work the harder, and harder than ever I must work."

Strange it is, how mortal man, "who cometh up and is cut down like the flower," can thus harden himself into stoical security, and count on the morrow, which may never come. Yet so it is; and, perhaps, if it were not so, no work would get done on earth,—at least by the many who know not that God is guiding them, while they fancy that they are guiding themselves.

CHAPTER II.

STILL LIFE

I must now, if I am to bring you to "Two years ago," and to my story, as it was told to me, ask you to follow me into the good old West Country, and set you down at the back of an old harbour pier; thirty feet of grey and brown boulders, spotted aloft with bright yellow lichens, and black drops of tar, polished lower down by the surge of centuries, and towards the foot of the wall roughened with crusts of barnacles, and mussel-nests in crack and cranny, and festoons of coarse dripping weed.

On a low rock at its foot, her back resting against the Cyclopean wall, sits a young woman of eight-and-twenty, soberly, almost primly dressed, with three or four tiny children clustering round her. In front of them, on a narrow spit of sand between the rocks, a dozen little girls are laughing, romping, and pattering about, turning the stones for "shannies" and "bullies," and other luckless fish left by the tide; while the party beneath the pier wall look steadfastly down into a little rock-pool at their feet,—full of the pink and green and purple cut-work of delicate weeds and coralline, and starred with great sea-dahlias, crimson and brown and grey, and with the waving snake-locks of the Cercus, pale blue, and rose-tipped like the fingers of the dawn. One delicate Medusa is sliding across the pool, by slow pantings of its crystal bell; and on it the eyes of the whole group are fixed,—for it seems to be the subject of some story which the village schoolmistress is finishing in a sweet, half-abstracted voice,—

"And so the cruel soldier was changed into a great rough red starfish, who goes about killing the poor mussels, while nobody loves him, or cares to take his part; and the poor little girl was changed into a beautiful bright jelly-fish, like that one, who swims about all day in the pleasant sunshine, with a red cross stamped on its heart."

"Oh, mistress, what a pretty story!" cry the little ones, with tearful eyes. "And what shall we be changed to when we die?"

"If we will only be good we shall go up to Jesus, and be beautiful angels, and sing hymns. Would that it might be soon, soon; for you and me, and all!" And she draws the children, to her, and looks upward, as if longing to bear them with her aloft.

Let us leave the conversation where it is, and look into the face of the speaker, who, young as she is, has already meditated so long upon the mystery of death that it has grown lovely in her eyes.

Her figure is tall, graceful, and slight, the severity of its outlines suiting well with the severity of her dress, with the brown stuff gown and plain grey whittle. Her neck is long, almost too long: but all defects are forgotten in the first look at her face. We can see it fully, for her bonnet lies beside her on the rock.

The masque, though thin, is perfect. The brow, like that of Greek statue, looks lower than it really is, for the hair springs from below the bend of the forehead. The brain is very long, and sweeps backward and upward in grand curves, till it attains above the ears a great expanse and height. She should be a character more able to feel than to argue; full of all a woman's veneration, devotion, love of children,—perhaps, too, of a woman's anxiety.

The nose is slightly aquiline; the sharp-cut nostrils indicate a reserve of compressed strength and passion; the mouth is delicate; the lips, which are full and somewhat heavy, not from coarseness, but rather from languor, show somewhat of both the upper and the under teeth. Her eyes are bent on the pool at her feet; so that we can see nothing of them but the large sleepy lids, fringed with lashes so long and dark that the eye looks as if it had been painted, in the Eastern fashion, with antimony; the dark lashes, dark eyebrows, dark hair, crisped (as West-country hair so often is) to its very roots, increase the almost ghostlike paleness of the face, not sallow, not snow-white, but of a clear, bloodless, waxen hue.